Do you worry that if your worst enemies were in power, something that you or a friend might say would lead to an arrest?
Who decides what is hate speech? Apparently the current UK government has decided these things (among others) are so hateful their perpetrators must be arrested:
- private WhatsApp chats between friends
- standing still in public with hands folded in prayer
Be careful when you give sharp tools to the golem.
> Don't whitewash this shit. You know full well what we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do. Playing with the line is still taking the piss and the UK believe in the spirit of the law to avoid all this mucking about with the specification. Otherwise I can block traffic all day and make up some bullshit excuse as to how I'm somehow innocent. These are feeble excuses that Palestine in Action would be proud of.
I don't think you know what happened. At least one case was a person standing quietly outside on a public sidewalk while not impeding traffic or people walking.
within the range of an abortion clinic. The UK has the spirit of the law. We don't tolerate people dicking about with the definition.
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce is the campaign director of 40 Days for Life Birmingham, which organises prayer vigils near abortion clinics, and a leader of March for Life UK.
She wasn't just "standing and praying". There's significant context.
She was literally campaigning against abortion near an abortion clinic which she knows is against the law. Criminals who have self-respect don't fucking live-stream their crimes and then act like a victim when they get arrested.
I don't care if it is against the law. The conversation was about free speech. I'll even give you that she was protesting. All that does is proves my point. If you are not allowed to protest quietly while not impeding anybody then you do not have free speech.
Second, it clearly wasn't against the law because they dropped the charges and gave her a settlement.
Third, just because something is against the law doesn't mean that you shouldn't have the right to say it. The law does not dictate morality.
If the parliament passed a law saying you cannot criticize them, would you say well it is the law and as such it isn't a violation of free speech? Would you call somebody doing that a criminal?
Fourth, the police literally said "You’ve said you’ve been engaging in prayer, which is the offense.". Meaning the offense was literally her thinking. If you are not allowed to have wrong think then there is clearly thought crimes.
She has free speech. If she wants to write an article, post a comment, write to her mp, she runs a few campaign groups, she can organise a march, she can talk freely about her opinion. Nobody stops her doing those things, she has free speech. What she doesn't have is the right to harass people who are trying to get an abortion. She has an effective restraining order from abortion clinics that she is violating as part of her campaigning.
Why don't you see the difference between free speech and harassment? Your stance undermines free speech by giving it zero responsibility. These are rights hard won by our ancestors and you cheapen them by pretending they're all about some cheap technicality that permits toxic groups to intimidate other people.
I don't think you are listening to yourself. You are literally saying that standing on the side of the road quietly and not impeding anybody is harassment.
If you think that is harassment then this is hopeless. Have a good day.
> Oh you've never seen an American movie, have you?
The idea that I got my account of the war from Hollywood as a Brit is absurd. I grew up with a first-hand account of the war living in the same house as me.
> If you're going to dismiss a population expert without even bothering to give an argument why, then I won't bother with you.
I've run the numbers myself a few times and 2066 is the domain of charlatans, not "population experts". I imagine this is one of those "white british" ones that don't count Irish people and also consider the loss of majority into plurality the same thing as "being a minority". Its all designed to generate fear, its so transparent and you should be embarrassed that you're falling for it. We're on hacker news. Make a github, make a model, run the numbers, ask gipity why your model is wrong, make it better, work out the numbers, learn the range, ask what you do about halfies, how to model birthrates that normalise after just two or even one generation. Its not 2066 unless you _really_ want it to be. That's the thing, its victim thirst. Everyone wants to be a victim in order to make their complaints feel justified. It ain't about what ACTUALLY happens in 2066, its about feeling angry in 2026.
You broke the site guidelines extremely badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. I'm not going to ban you right now because (unlike the other account) you don't seem to been doing it in other threads lately. But please make a point of not doing it again, because (if I go back far enough) you do have a history of getting warned and banned (and unbanned) here.
> because (if I go back far enough) you do have a history of getting warned and banned (and unbanned) here.
Unless I'm missing something, that was once, like a decade ago or something, a testy conversation about history. I was shadow banned for ages and then some mod noticed my comments were good quality and restored me. So that seems like a bit of an uncharitable read given the age of my account and my average comment score.
I appreciate I was far off the mark here and I appreciate the warning. This particular subject is very triggering for me given the impact in my nation of American money influencing our politics. I'll try my best to be better but its hard.
Typically a Streisand effect involves filing a lawsuit to try to stop something, which then raises awareness more broadly and makes the problem you’re suing to correct worse. In the canonical example, it’s “everyone stop taking pictures of my house!”, now pictures of your house are everywhere.
With a reasonably more generous definition, this case can indeed be considered a Streisand effect, if the problem gets worse by calling attention to it because now more idiots know about it. But a lawsuit would seal the deal!
Not OP, but it’s not incompatible that dark-energy expansion (and ultimate big rip event) in a child universe correlates to the same process as black hole evaporation (and final event) for the originating black hole, if the “black hole universe” theory holds and they remain geometrically connected.
Genuinely wondering (aka not snarky): Has anyone found frontier models to provide useful research in the context of European civil law systems?
Your comment made me wonder if there are any halfway-acceptable model benchmarks for law tasks? Specifically I’d love to know how the frontier models’ abilities compare between common law vs. civil law systems. My guess would be that an AI in a common law context should have a clearer idea of how a specific case is interpreted/accepted by (common law) practitioners, whereas trying to rely on AI in a civil law context, like Germany, can be daunting. In a few Germany-specific recent examples, the models feel like they present only (maybe too stubbornly?) the “civil law”-based laws. All while negating much of AI’s research benefits because civil statutes are portrayed as being absolutely accurate, binding, and their enforcement (and thereby the legal reality) being uniformly applied. Am I making this interpretation up? If so, how can I prove myself wrong?
I don't know of anything that is working yet, but I know some people working on it (intentionally vague).
Roman law, on which the legal systems of Germany, most of Europe, Turkey etc. are based relies more heavily on statutes than Anglo-American case law, but cases do play a role there, too. That's why a practically useful system also needs to have access to court decisions, commentary etc. - and while the statues are in the public domain, a lot of the other knowledge is owned by specialist publishers (such as: C.H. Beck, Nomos, Mohr Siebeck, De Gruyter, Otto Schmidt, C.F. Müller, Manz, Verlag Österreich, Schulthess, Stämpfli, Dalloz, LexisNexis, Lefebvre Dalloz, Giuffrè Francis Lefebvre, CEDAM, Giappichelli, Il Mulino, Aranzadi, Tirant lo Blanch, Marcial Pons, Dykinson, Tecnos, Lefebvre, Almedina, Gestlegal, AAFDL, Kluwer, Boom juridisch, Wolters Kluwer, Larcier-Intersentia, Anthemis, Sakkoulas, Nomiki Bibliothiki, Universul Juridic, Hamangiu).
Internationally, legal systems appear to undergo a sort of convergence, which means statutes increasingly matter in the U.S. and cases increasingly matter in European law (according to a law partner friend).
Hi,
As for benchmarks for law tasks: I also have a concern regarding how the more popular benchmarks (like the tasks in Harvey Legal Agent Benchmark) can accurately reflect actual work done by lawyers. Not only in civil law systems, but also in non-BigLaw type of work areas.
Most of the law tasks should inherently reflect the legal system they are based on. It is an oversimplification that lawyers in one country tend to do the same legal work as lawyers in another, that's a form of dishonest framing from LLM providers working in this area (it is that important for them to be able to scale and disregard traditional fragmentation of the legal services).
The legal systems of common law countries are quite similar in both how they do legal training and in many areas that are important for business. Like in contract law or tort. That means not only similar concepts and foundations (things first taught to law students), but also a similar approach to what is seen as a legal problem, and what kind of answers people expect from a lawyer. Also, what they understand under "legal research" - what do you actually research and what is expected from a qualified lawyer to know by heart, how are you expected to find the legal default in a detailed question, how certain that default is, what is up to professional judgment.
But even the differences within common law systems is huge in other areas that go beyond these basics. Like those affected by statutes, codes (like CFR or NYCRR) or even local regulations etc. The popular legal benchmarks do not dare going into these more detailed legal work directions. And these laws change frequently, and they are very different from one jurisdiction to another, even within the US, let alone in other countries building on English legal traditions.
(Nobody I know of is building a benchmark that affects these areas of law.)
And the diversity is even bigger within legal systems lumped together as "civil law systems". Even those based on Roman law, or on German jurisprudence in the 19th century... There is not much common in how French and German students study law, even if both are members of the EU and many areas of law are harmonised or subject to the same legal acts of the EU and the same EU Court of Justice.
If your LLM has access to up to date legal databases of those countries, commentaries etc., the answers are still surprisingly useful in research. That said, no professional should rely on those LLMs that merely use public legal databases, scraping latest laws and cases via self-operated MCP servers.
I think the main difference is how lawyers from a civil law system use the LLMs compared to someone from a common law system - and that is based on the different training they receive as law students, how they see "law" etc. Maybe there is no such a thing as absolute accuracy in the civil statutes either, but at least civil law lawyers have a stronger notion of "law is knowable". There is a higher likelihood of having one "correct" answer, even when talking about more lifelike, detailed questions.
(I'm qualified in both a civil and a common law system but not specifically in German law.)
Someone tried to build the extra chair but the endless required studies and legal challenges from existing chair-sitters bankrupted the would-be chair builder.
Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
Everyone wants to blame existing landowners and sure they share part of it but the lion's share of the blame ought to be directed at do-gooders (land owning or otherwise) who are unwilling to be honest (with themselves, or in the internet comments) and admit that every policy that "looks good" based on the one sided statements presented in abstract by its peddlers.
Each one of those policies is part of the system that gets us the results we have and the peddlers all share in the blame.
> Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
Maybe you need 5 chairs? Here in SF supply has fallen decades behind the demand curve to the point it may be impossible to catch up even if all you did was build build build.
decades of reasonable, consistently applied housing policy led to the creation of islands of wealth, surrounded by oceans of poverty. ergo, this is the purpose. this is how the people there want to live. I left many years ago when I realized the futility of it all.
I call SF and Silicon Valley “the world’s only slum for the rich.”
What buys you a trap house or an apartment with hallways that smell like piss in SF or the Valley will buy you a mansion in 90% of the country at least.
> So, if compelled, Apple could theoretically tell someone if two images came from the same camera.
No they couldn't.
If you generate two SSH key pairs on your laptop, there's no way to confirm they were created on the same machine.
There's no device identifying data in a reference image, which is the point. The factory signature, the image sensor key, the Secure Enclave Processor key and all of the signing that takes place on PCC are all device-agnostic.
The reference image is processed and eventually signed by Private Cloud Compute's post-quantum signature using a hybrid MLDSA87-RSA-3072-PSS-SHA512 scheme.
So… it's not possible for Apple to know if two images came from the same iPhone.
I am not sure I follow. The private keys in the image sensor and the SEP are static, so you can see that two images are signed with the same private key. Apple 'decorrelates' this by letting PCC verify the signature and then replacing it by their own signature:
When the user initiates developing a reference image, the device uploads the secure digital negative to Private Cloud Compute. PCC recomputes the digest embedded in the frame and verifies the sensor's signature over the pixels and that digest, verifying the certificate chain back to the sensor CA. PCC also verifies the SEP signature and chains it to the BAA CA, and it verifies the signature on the device manifest and chains it to the CA that signs device manifests at the factory. It then confirms that the sensor and SEP named in those chains belong to the same device. [...] If these checks pass, PCC then submits the commitment to our signing service, which signs it with a composite post-quantum signature using a hybrid MLDSA87-RSA-3072-PSS-SHA512 scheme. The signature is embedded in the JPEG, and the reference image is returned to the device, which associates it with the main photo from the original capture.
After the secure digital negative is successfully developed, it's automatically moved to the deleted photos folder."
So in the end it all depends on how much you trust Apple's cloud and PCC nodes. If there is a weakness in their services, Apple could record both the original signatures and their signature, and could prove whether two photos were made using the same lens/device and they could even trace it back to a specific device (by looking up the original signature + signing identity given their signature).
I stand corrected. If it’s truly only the signatures and zero other identifying info, then yes you’re as secure as the underlying algorithm. I think they implied there are multiple device-originated signatures for different parts of the data, this may open some possibilities for cryptanalysis
if the voters and legislature have the “bravery” to pass the wealth tax law, it will be aggressively enforced by the FTB
the second-order effects, whatever they may be, would be clearly visible within a couple years.
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